Fodor's may use your email address to send you relevant information on site updates, account changes, and offers. For more information about your privacy and protection, please review our full Privacy Policy.

Travel From Lucerne to Basel

Does someone know how long it takes to drive from Hotel Palace Lucerne to Basel Euroairport?
We have hired a car to drive us and they are telling us its an hour drive. Unfortunately, we cannot take the train and had to hire a car. So I want to be sure we have enough time to be driven to the airport and make our flight. Our flight leaves at 2:00 p.m. and they are picking us up at 10:30 a.m. Is that enough time?

The Basel airport is minute so I don;t think it will take too long to maneuver through it. If an hour is enough for the drive I'm not sure since conditions can be different every day (weather, traffic, construction, etc).

I assume there is a special reason to go to the Basel airport since you can get a train from Lucerne to the train station under the Zurich airport in about an hour. Although Zurich is larger and can take longer to get through.

You will have plenty of time. Driving time is usually a bit more than one hour, so you will arrive at 11:40. Even with traffic jams, you will be there by 12:00. This will still give you a time buffer of at least one hour.

I agree it would have been much easier to travel to Zurich, but unfortunately we were mislead by our Travel Agent about what airport to travel to and they booked us on a flight from Basel airport. To change airports would have cost us too much $. It is for physical reasons that we had to hire a private car to drive us. For us, traveling by train proves to be too demanding.

>>> but unfortunately we were mislead by our Travel Agent about what airport to travel to and they booked us on a flight from Basel airport.

More reason why most of the posters here don't use TAs. Outside being a re-seller of prepackaged tours, my current take on US based TA is only about commissions and fees with least amount of time spent to produce idiotic itineraries.

This past week, it took up two two hours to get from central Luzern to Basel due to various traffic conditions. IMO, one hour is not enough to get to the airport (which is on the far side of Basel from where you're starting). Doing the door to door trip in one hour is asking a pretty solid favor from the luck gods. I would give it 90 minutes just to be safe.

everything will work out fine and your travel agent did not a trick on you.

There are enough smart asses who know better, but you have done the right thing. The limo will be five minutes early at your hotel, and even with traffic jams, you will be on time at the airport which is small and quick (unlike Zürich, where walking to the gate may take 20 minutes).